Press Release

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present RE pleasure RUN, an exhibition of new works by Berlin-based, Italian artist Monica Bonvicini. The exhibition includes painting, photography, neon works and a large-scale installation, showcasing the artist’s interest in the relationships between gender, architecture and the power dynamics that shape our world. The exhibition is Bonvicini’s debut at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Best known for her large-scale sculptural installations that engage architectural space and the viewer through dry humor, Monica Bonvicini rejects categorization and questions elements of control, gender, and power embedded in images, language and physical space.

The exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash will be anchored around an installation titled Structural Psychodramas #2, in which the artist uses temporary walls in the gallery to create a new architectural environment. The walls will be bare and slightly lifted, supported by small murano glass sculptures underneath. As the title suggests, the work is part of a new series in which the artist uses the walls of institutions and galleries to undermine the structural functionality of such places, while also prescribing them with an open possibility for an imaginary performance.

In addition to the central installation, Bonvicini will also present two large-scale neon light sculptures. One neon sign boldly reads “NO MORE MASTURBATION”. The sign issues an imperative to the viewer but also raises a question about the significance of desire and pleasure in the current hyper-capitalist moment: is pleasure possible without the goal of productivity? This sculpture, as well as the title of the show RE pleasure RUN, is part of Bonvicini’s ongoing investigation into language and its legitimacy as an absolute form of communication.

Two monumental pictorial works will occupy the gallery’s east and west walls. The first, a black-and-white varnish painting in four panels titled Mountain Town 2015 depicts a California house burning from a wildfire, its structure reduced to a bare framework. Beginning with a series of disaster paintings in 2006, notions of catastrophe and destruction have been recurrent themes for Bonvicini. The present work belongs to a more recent series focused on man-made catastrophes, mostly homes being destroyed by natural causes, which are the consequences of the effects of global warming.

The second large-scale image is a wallpapered photograph that depicts two male workers building a brick wall. The image recalls a billboard advertisement, but without geographical identifiers and with the workers faces obscured.

While Bonvicini takes advantage of disparate materials and mediums, her works as a whole function as equally significant aspect of her practice. Through an ongoing engagement of physical and psychological space, the viewer becomes an integral, yet indiscernible, part of the work.

Artists

Press

For this exhibition, the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Monica Bonvicini bisected Mitchell-Innes & Nash's main space with a temporary wall supported by two small, dildolike "sculptures" in Murano glass resting on the floor. The installation, Structural Psychodrama #2 (2017), succinctly encapsulated the central theme of her work over the last twenty years: the imbrication of sex and architecture through relationships between the body and its shelters, barriers, props, and frames. As Bonvicini put it in a 2004 interview, "You have something under your belt and something over your head. And you need both."

RE pleasure RUN” is Bonvicini’s first New York exhibition in 10 years. Fittingly, it could be thought of as a kind of mini-survey, bringing together all the predominant strains of the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist’s varied practice—namely wall-based installations, light and leather sculptures, found photo collages, works on paper, paints, and glass dildos. Over the course of her 30-year career, Bonvicini has explored through these projects issues around identity, structures of power, and the limits of language. And she has done so with her signature mixture of provocation, innuendo, and wit. The resulting message, if there is one, is often ambiguous.

The aggressively enigmatic works of the Italian artist suggest a lot and explain little, beyond dropped hints of erotic and political discontent. Walls are shimmed up on small glass-phallus sculptures. Clustered men’s belts assume a testicular shape. Fragmented syllables in white neon, on an aluminum rack, instruct “No more masturbation,” but they don’t say why. In a grainy photographic mural, workmen do something incomprehensible to a grimy brick wall. Scores of white L.E.D. tubes hang horizontally in tangles of wire. What’s it all about? Your call.

Over on 25th street, Monica Bonvicini’s solo show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, RE pleasure RUN, conflates erections with erection—construction—of architectural elements, including walls, in an S&M-tinted play on gender roles, production and displays of power and gratification. Mitchell-Innes & Nash is also showing at the Independent Art Fair, with work by Pope.L.

Bonvicini addresses power dynamics, effective communication, and even the structure of the gallery itself in this new show. Central to the exhibition is Structural Psychodramas #2 (2017), a large-scale installation of temporary walls that questions the architecture of art institutions. Neon text works, one of which reads “NO MORE MASTURBATION,” offer a cheeky commentary on the role of desire in the present moment.

Berlin-based, Italian conceptual artist Monica Bonvicini gets her first New York solo show in a decade. Her debut at the gallery centers on Structural Psychodramas #2, an installation of small Murano glass sculptures, as well as two of the artist’s monumental disaster paintings and large-scale, provocative neon works, one of which reads “NO MORE MASTURBATION.”

There’s something undeniably seductive about Monica Bonvicini’s work. Whether it’s a neon sculpture or painting of a burned-out building, her (usually monochromatic) pieces have a vaguely S&M quality and wouldn’t look out of place in the background of a high-fashion editorial photoshoot. But beyond looking good, they’re subtly loaded with content. Bonvicini speaks to structures, both literally (as in the architectural sense) and figuratively (as in those of power).

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